Geoffrey Paulsen's page

Does anyone else find it difficult to approximate the difficulty level of large parties of players? All of the CRs for monsters are designed for about 4 players. We play with 7 or 8 players, sometimes 9! I find it difficult to design encounters for the players that are not total pushovers, and yet don't completely annihilate the party.

I came up with a complex system, by trying to reverse engineer the CR table on page 49 of the DMG. It seems to work well so far, though the players tend to level after about 5 or 6 encounters. Which is fine with us, since we're all power gamers. :)

I'm curious if anyone else has a system for large parties, or if anyone else even bothers with large parties.

-Geoff

I would like to see some sort of guidlines as to how to design an encounter for large parties. For example, I currently have 7 players and one co-DM, and have a terrible time trying to design encounters, based either on CR or on EL.

I know that Monster CRs are based on a 4 player 25% of resources estimation, though it's VERY difficult to scale that out to a 6 or 7 player amount. I suggest an article in Dragon detailing the CR rules, and scaling them out to LARGE groups of say up to 8 players.

Even a discussing in this message board of experences of people who have LARGE (6 or more) players would be of help.

In my experence, large numbers of players usually needs more monsters, though not neccisarily more difficult monsters, along with some good combat tactics, and settings (see DMG page 50, difficulty factors).